#47 Top Rated Seller Tip-Don't Waste Time With Customer Support
If you want to be successful selling online you are going to have to learn not to depend on customer support. Customer support personnel are traditionally the lowest paid employees of a corporation. They seldom have any power. Most are ill-trained. Why is this so? Customer support can pretty much depend on the 80/20 rule. 80% of the calls are made by 20% of the customers. These 20% are going to call about every minor problem. They load a computer up with all known minor problems and put a low-paid employee working the phones. They type in your problem and read directly off the screen. If they misunderstand your question you can get all sorts of answers. If your question is out of the ordinary you are pretty much on your own.
I have sold online since 2000 and during that time I have sold many thousands of items. I have called eBay customer support once that I remember and Amazon customer support once, also. Neither one of these calls accomplished anything.
I have found that when i find a glitch on a e-commerce site that it usually disappears in a short period of time. If it doesn't there are plenty of other users that have so little to do that they are on the phone immediately to customer support. If there is a glitch that keeps me from doing my work I just go and work on another venue until the problem is resolved. If I get to the other venue and there is a problem there I can pretty well assume there is either a problem with my computer or ISP.
Any glitches that don't go away within a day or so I can go to any number of discussion boards and make a posting. there will always be an answer there if this is a system wide problem. The chances of finding the right answer on discussion boards are a lot better than calling customer support anytime because by the time I post on the discussion board every bored seller on that venue has already called customer support and has come to post their experience. I have used a the Seller's Soapbox discussion board on Amazon.com for years. I can find an answer to almost any question about almost anything within minutes of posting there.
Facebook and Twitter are also two very good places to get information, although I have found it much less reliable than discussion boards.
To be successful selling online you have to make the best use of your valuable time. For me, that is not calling customer support.
Your thoughts, please.
I have sold online since 2000 and during that time I have sold many thousands of items. I have called eBay customer support once that I remember and Amazon customer support once, also. Neither one of these calls accomplished anything.
I have found that when i find a glitch on a e-commerce site that it usually disappears in a short period of time. If it doesn't there are plenty of other users that have so little to do that they are on the phone immediately to customer support. If there is a glitch that keeps me from doing my work I just go and work on another venue until the problem is resolved. If I get to the other venue and there is a problem there I can pretty well assume there is either a problem with my computer or ISP.
Any glitches that don't go away within a day or so I can go to any number of discussion boards and make a posting. there will always be an answer there if this is a system wide problem. The chances of finding the right answer on discussion boards are a lot better than calling customer support anytime because by the time I post on the discussion board every bored seller on that venue has already called customer support and has come to post their experience. I have used a the Seller's Soapbox discussion board on Amazon.com for years. I can find an answer to almost any question about almost anything within minutes of posting there.
Facebook and Twitter are also two very good places to get information, although I have found it much less reliable than discussion boards.
To be successful selling online you have to make the best use of your valuable time. For me, that is not calling customer support.
Your thoughts, please.
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